Perhaps the postcard in Sarah’s dream was intended for Oyster or Gideon. Its message may indeed have been important for the addressee, but as for Sarah-outside-the-dream, she can dismiss such little losses with detachment.
She certainly feels detached. She feels as though she is floating slightly above the bed. Her room shimmers with light that is excessively bright, and there are small spinning discs, or more accurately red circles, hollow, bleeding into yellow at both their inner and outer edges. She would have to describe them as miniature flaming circus hoops. They float in all directions, and collide and coalesce and part again.
It seems important to recognise this landscape of spinning lights, but Sarah cannot think where she is. She can feel the edges of a great pool of dread lapping at the room, at the bed, at the sheets, at this filmy thing . . . what is it? She seems to be inside a cocoon. There are folds of net spilling out of some point above her, enclosing the bed, and just beyond the pleats of the net are the wavelets of dread. She has a sense of marshes, and of backwaters that twist and mislead, and of treacherous quicksand traps, and of salt pans . . .
Salt pans?
Sarah inspects the words with curiosity. They are new to her, and yet she seems to know what they mean: shimmering stretches of deception across which she will have to find stepping stones. The salt pans are part of the puzzle, part of the labyrinth, but she has read somewhere, she cannot remember where, that a foolproof recipe exists for escaping a maze. If one takes every turn to the left, and only turns to the left, eventually one will be free. Can that be right? But what does she do if three left turns lead to a dead end? Go back one turn? There must be another rule she has forgotten.
Nevertheless she must begin. She swivels her eyes to the left. Where is she? She can rule out her apartment in Boston because there is no horse-chestnut tree beyond the window. She senses movement, and has a vague sense of people crossing and of traffic sounds, much thinner than usual, a single vehicle, perhaps. The vehicle coughs and purrs and misfires and falls into silence. Perhaps she dreamed it. Now she can hear nothing, see nothing, beyond the window.
The window must be open, or perhaps there is no glass, because the lace curtain keeps lifting very slightly, even though the air seems hot and still. Beyond the lace, there is a thin wafer of greenness, and beyond the green, something red and burning hurls against the house a light of such intensity that the curtain has become more or less invisible, has become a radiant membrane between what is on Sarah’s side of the window and what is beyond. She blinks several times and now it seems to her that she can see her classroom at the school in Boston, the children’s drawings on the walls, and Amy, mutinous, glowering, with her sheaf of black sketches.
‘What are these, Amy?’ she asks.
‘They’re for my birthday,’ Amy says. ‘I’m seven today.’
‘And it’s the birthday girl’s turn for Show and Tell. Tell us who gave you your present?’
‘I gave them to me. I made them.’
‘I see,’ Sarah says. ‘Happy faces. Smiling for your birthday and floating like bubbles on a fizzy birthday drink.’
‘They’re not smiling for my birthday. They’re smiling because they can fly away wherever they want to,’ Amy says scornfully. ‘They’re balloon people, that’s why. That’s their heads floating on strings, and that’s their bodies down there. They leave them behind. They don’t feel anything. They can fly wherever they want.’
‘Ah,’ Sarah says.
‘I’m a balloon person,’ Amy explains.
‘Can we all fly with you on your birthday?’
‘No,’ Amy says. ‘My balloon people fly so high it’s freezing up there, and they have to wear mittens.’
‘Ah yes,’ Sarah says. ‘I can see their mittens.’
‘I’m a balloon person.’
‘Yes, you said. Is that why you took everyone’s mittens from the locker room?’
‘I didn’t,’ Amy says. She scrunches her drawings up into a ball and throws them into the wastepaper basket. ‘There aren’t any balloon people,’ she says witheringly. ‘People can’t fly.’
‘Why don’t we get all the mittens out of your locker and give them back to everyone?’
‘Except my father,’ Amy says. ‘He’s a balloon man. You could fly with him.’
Sarah turns restlessly, and bats at the mosquito net and the sun, and here is Amy bringing Stephen on a string. He bobs about at the window, ballooning, eddying this way and that. He has magic marker eyes, perfectly round, unnaturally wide and bright, with glowing black pupils and lashes like rays of the sun. His mouth is curved like a banana, but when he twists on his string and shows his about-face, the banana is turned upside-down.
Stephen eddies and dances in the currents of white light, and Amy tugs his string and smiles and hands the string to Sarah. ‘Hold him tight,’ Amy says, ‘because he keeps on flying away.’
‘He’s not my balloon, Amy,’ Sarah says.
‘Yes, he is,’ Amy insists. ‘Mummy doesn’t want him, and he doesn’t want her either, he doesn’t want to go flying with her any more. He has lots and lots and lots of balloon women, but I don’t like them. I want him to fly with you. See?’ And now Amy has Sarah on a string, and she ties the two strings together and lets them go. The Stephen and Sarah balloons bounce against each other and lift and twist and touch and bounce. Amy catches them again, and tugs them through a restaurant door.
‘I’m Amy’s teacher,’ Sarah explains.
‘What I specialise in,’ Stephen says, ‘apart from mathematics, that is . . . May I say that I am mesmerised by your eyes?’
‘Amy is a gifted child,’ Sarah says, ‘and extremely intelligent, but I worry about her. She withdraws into herself. It’s as though, even when she is talking to me, she is absent.’
‘Yes,’ Stephen says absently, staring into Sarah’s eyes.
‘All her drawings are in black crayon,’ Sarah says. ‘She never uses any of the other colours. It’s disturbing, don’t you think?’
‘Not particularly,’ Stephen says. ‘Her mother’s an artist who works with charcoal a lot. Who abuses charcoal, I’m tempted to say, although all that smudging seems to appeal in grotty little third-rate galleries in Harvard Square. Charcoal, of course, is not the only substance her mother abuses.’
‘I think Amy feels abandoned.’
‘We both need someone,’ Stephen says. ‘Amy and I. We’ve both been abandoned. Her mother’s gone off to live with ten people in an artists’ commune, not one of them sane, in my opinion.’
Amy draws on the paper napkins. She draws three balloons with their strings tied together in a bow. She encloses them all in a little house.
Stephen takes Sarah’s hand. ‘Will you come and have dinner with us tomorrow?’
‘Well,’ Sarah says, losing her way a little in Stephen’s eyes. ‘Yes. All right.’
‘I’m writing a book,’ Stephen says, ‘about the relationship between fractal curves and irregular mathematical sequences and art. Does the Lorenz Attractor mean anything? Or the Mandelbrot Set?’
‘Ahh . . . I’ve heard of them,’ Sarah says. ‘I think.’
‘I’ve just got the photographs back,’ Stephen says. ‘The experimental artwork. For the book plates. They’re quite stunning. I’ll show you if you’re interested.’
‘Yes,’ Sarah says, uncertainly, though it is Amy whom she does not want to lose sight of. She can feel the riffs and syncopations of her heartbeat as the child floats away into the margins of photographic plates and over the page.
‘Amy!’ she calls. ‘Amy!’ She is riffling pages, careening through fractal muddle, straining for the string of Amy’s balloon.
‘You lost him,’ Amy accuses, just out of reach, drifting skywards. ‘You let go his string.’
‘It’s the Lorenz Attractor,’ Sarah says, watching the twinned swirling strings spiralling into the sun. She holds her arm over her eyes, but the light makes them water, it burns, and Amy is in danger,
flying too close to the fire. Remember Icarus, Sarah warns. She grapples with the mosquito net. She cries out.
On the verandah, Mercy and her mother startle and hold themselves still. Mercy knocks over her chair as she rises. Is it possible that she is running when her feet feel like leaden weights?
‘Sarah?’ she asks through the window, breathing fast. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I didn’t, I didn’t,’ Sarah says.
‘Sarah?’ Mercy calls. ‘Is there someone –?’
She checks herself. She can see there is no one else in the room.
(Fear is just another form of superstition, Mercy; we breed it ourselves, we make it ourselves in our minds; we can unmake it.
I know, Miss Rover. I know. I know I can people a whole country or a whole book with my mind. I know I can make you come back. I know perfectly well it’s impossible for anyone to reach the house unseen. I know I can make Sarah safe.)
‘It’s OK, Sarah,’ Mercy says. ‘There’s no one here. Just us. You’ve been dreaming.’
Sarah opens her eyes and blinks. ‘Amy?’ she asks.
‘No. It’s me, Mercy.’
‘Why do you always run away?’ Sarah asks. ‘Don’t you understand . . . ?’
Doesn’t Amy understand how precarious the balance is? Amy counts on Sarah, but Sarah herself steps like a heron across quicksand. If Amy sinks, Sarah fears she may lose her own footing. Sarah wants to take her by the shoulders and shake her. Don’t you see? Don’t you understand what you’re doing?
Sarah closes her eyes against the light and covers her face with her hands. The glare is so fierce she can see the network of veins and the blood flowing through them. She can see tiny bubbles and whirlpools and the brackish capillary dispersal into deltas and the foaming push of the floodwater arteries at her wrists. In between all this busy bloody canal traffic, her flesh is translucent, and she sees, through the luminous membrane, her body’s present anchorage. It is Stephen’s cottage in Maine, though this is odd, because she cannot remember another time when the light in the cottage has been so intense. No doubt the fierce heat is responsible for this opaque film that covers everything, for the fuzziness, for the lack of clarity. She can actually see more clearly with the pillow over her eyes.
Behind the pillow and against the underside of her lids, the images sharpen. Now she has her bearings: salt pans, the cottage, the lake. She dips a paddle over the side of her bed, and strokes, and feathers the tip, and makes her way through the mosquito net and then through the window and on to the porch. She steps ashore and walks from room to room.
The cottage is deserted.
There are various signs of Stephen’s presence (his plaid jacket behind the kitchen door, a small pile of books and scribbled notes on the bedside table), but none of the signs is recent. She leafs through the notes beside the bed. Most of them are mathematical equations, unintelligible, but she finds one containing words:
That passed the time.
It would have passed in any case.
Yes, but not so rapidly.
She stares at the note. She feels edgy. The words are part of the riddle of unease. She can smell something musty in the air, the trace of absence. She must have arrived on a day towards the end, and even as she thinks this she can feel a horrible agitation in her body, something that starts at her fingertips, something icy which advances like pins and needles, dispensing shivers. She huddles under the sheet, pulling it higher. The End. She picks up another small ball of paper and unravels it. Endgame, it says. She feels colder. Experimentally, in the hope of effecting some sort of exorcism, she says aloud, ‘I am frightened of endings. I am frightened of finding out how things end.’ Somehow the admission eases her panic slightly. Of course, she realises, it is the end that she has been sensing, it is the end that has been lapping at the hemline of her sheet. The cottage smells of that time of dread when Stephen has begun to absent himself more and more often, when he is devoting himself to the mathematical computation of his vanishing point. Negative reality, he calls it.
She can hear loons calling from the lake, pure and plaintive, each note falling on to the porch like a soft wet ball of leaves. If Stephen were to emit some sound from wherever he is – in his office at the university, or in his parked car, or simply leaning against a fallen tree trunk in the woods, perhaps – his voice would sound the same, it would reach her in the same way.
She wanders out to the porch where the swing waits with her book and marker just as she left them. She rocks gently back and forth, back and forth, reading, waiting. Around her the air is ominously still. She is conscious of the heaviness that precedes a violent summer storm. She can feel the air sucking at her skin, pulling her body towards what is going to happen.
There is a kind of melancholy that is almost indistinguishable from peace, she thinks. It arrives after one has given up the notion that there is still something one could do to alter the course of events. One surrenders. One gives oneself over to the seductive drift of helplessness. She supposes that this is really exhaustion, but it is strangely pleasurable. She is without anchor now, as Stephen has been for some time, and yet who could have believed that would be possible? She had aligned herself with absolute safety, she thought; she had married into WASP fortresses, all the New England bulwarks and Episcopalian guy-ropes of respectability buckling her in.
She is without anchor now, as Stephen has been for some time, as Amy has always been. She can understand, almost, what lures them.
Even before she hears the roar of the car, she is aware of the disturbances it sends ahead of itself: the flocks of birds rising, the squirrels chirruking panic down the line; and then of course the muffler, deafening in its absence, and the soft tympanic counterpoint of bushes slapping against the metal flanks. Sarah braces herself for the tug of war: of Amy ravenous for consolation; of wolfish Amy, ferociously unreachable, holding all comfort at bay. Nevertheless, in spite of herself, she feels hope. Amy is coming. Amy keeps coming. Amy, perhaps, believes that Sarah can break the spell. And Sarah, not Princess Charming but the wicked stepmother herself, has to hack a way through the thorns and unspell the spell and wake up the damaged sleeper. She has to convey to Amy that it is possible to survive both the age of seventeen and the dreadful onset of the awareness of parental imperfection and frailty. I did it, she wants to tell Amy. It can be done. (And perhaps it can also be undone; Sarah is never sure. Her sister and her sister’s children have done it differently, with equal uncertainty of lasting success.)
Amy’s car spits back the woods, lurches across the humps of exposed granite in the clearing, ploughs through unmown grass, and brakes hard up against the verandah railings. Her driver’s licence is recent, and she is drunk, still, with this heady new access to power underfoot and at the tips of her fingers. Her car is a sports model, not quite old enough to be vintage, but certainly sufficiently used to have attained a good brash age of defiance. Various parts of the vehicle are missing, and Amy flaunts these gaps like trophy flags, especially the thunderous proclamations of the space where the muffler used to be.
Amy cuts the engine, and a sudden shocking silence fills the air. She slams the car door.
‘Where’s Dad?’ she asks lightly, thumbs through the belt loops of her jeans. She gives a credible performance of indifference, but only fleetingly. Without the armour of her car and the protective mechanisms of noise, her defiance seeps away like air from a slow puncture. She turns her back, looking through the trees towards the lake. She does not wait for an answer, but runs down the slope towards the dock, scooping up a handful of pebbles as she goes. She skips her stones, one by one, across the skin of the water. Sarah watches the light catch the whirr of their spinning passage, and sometimes hears the soft plash as they disappear. After she has skipped her last stone, Amy throws herself down at the end of the dock, flat on her stomach, and stares at her image.
Sarah looks into nowhere, waiting. She is grateful simply for the presence. We could live like this, she
thinks; we could be silent and with distance between us, but at peace, each knowing the other safe. That would be enough.
Restless, Amy swings herself into sitting position, pulls off her shoes, stands, and dives into the lake fully clothed, neatly and quietly as a just-caught fish slipping back off the dock. The green surface of the water closes over her and is sheer as glass. Nothing breaks the surface, no ripple, no sound. Seconds lap softly against the shingle and pile themselves up. Birds call, but otherwise the silence is as loud as Sarah’s heartbeat and thuds against her skin. She can hardly breathe. Too many minutes have piled up. Something is wrong. She runs down the slope to the dock. ‘Amy!’ she calls, stumbling.
‘Yes?’ Amy says, pulling herself out from under the dock. There is just a small, sucking, slapping sound. She hooks her arms over the mildewed boards.
Sarah breathes raggedly. She sinks down on to the dock, her legs trembling, and rests her hand on Amy’s wet arm, but Amy is as slippery as lakeweed. ‘Please don’t do that to me,’ Sarah says. She stares at the quicksilver place where their two reflections coalesce and dissolve. It is myself I hold on to, she thinks.
‘Where’s Dad?’ Amy asks quietly.
‘I don’t know.’
Amy disappears, then knifes out of the water on the opposite side of the dock. She hoists herself up, pleats and unpleats her body, and walks back up to the cottage, swinging her hips, and peeling off her sodden clothing as she goes, dropping it piece by piece behind her. On the verandah, she huddles in a deckchair, naked.
Oyster Page 15
